For an object lesson in the perils of central planning, look no further than what happens when governments plan their own capitals

JUST lately, the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan has been busy moving its capital from the bustling city of Almaty to the rural backwater of Akmola. The new seat of government suffers frequent shortages of electricity, gas and water. Its site on the over-farmed and eroded steppe guarantees frequent dust storms, howling winds and icy winters. There is no overall plan for Akmola's redevelopment, despite the government's predictions that the city's population will double by 2005. The president hopes that tax benefits and the like will induce private investors to pay for the removal, but the government has said neither how much the project will cost nor how much has been paid for.

Unsurprisingly, the notion that Akmola will ever supersede Almaty is greeted as lunacy by Kazakhs and foreigners alike. At the time of the move, only nine foreign embassies had been allocated plots in the new capital, let alone started construction. Only one small Russian airline flies to Akmola's tiny airport; other carriers may eventually follow, but do not ask when.

Even as Kazakhstan was embarking on this seeming folly, Malaysia was scaling back plans for a new $8-billion capital of its own. The collapse of the Malaysian ringgit, and fears about the government's fiscal abandon, forced a reluctant Mahathir Mohamad, the country's prime minister, to shelve all but the first phase of his planned “paperless” city, Putrajaya. Set back—for who knows how long—are grandiose schemes for a 270-square-kilometre “multimedia supercorridor”, complete with its own “multimedia university” and an “intellectual property park”.

Undaunted, the prime minister's office is still scheduled to move to the digital wonderland of Putrajaya by September 1998. There, having launched the construction of Asia's largest airport and completed the world's two tallest buildings (but not, alas, the world's longest, whose construction has, not surprisingly, been postponed), Dr Mahathir will conduct the world's first virtual cabinet meeting using the latest video-conferencing technology. Ultimately, the paperless communications network envisioned by Dr Mahathir is supposed to enable citizens to pay tax, ministers to decree, and civil servants to confer without the felling of a single tree.

Dr Mahathir doubtless views Putrajaya as a bold innovation in the field of urban design, a far cry from the chaos of Akmola. But, at least so far as delays, shortages of money and public complaints are concerned, Putrajaya and Akmola are peas from the same pod. Every ready-made capital ever built has suffered from the same chaotic construction and popular scepticism. Worse, even if such cities are eventually completed (many are not), they inevitably fail to meet expectations: the development they are supposed to promote never comes, the images they are intended to project soon lose relevance, and, centuries later, they retain an artificial air which continues to hamper their growth.

As with economies, so with urban architecture: the trouble with central planning is that, “paperless cities” notwithstanding, it only works on paper. Perhaps, before they plough on with their schemes, Kazakh and Malaysian officials should consider the cautionary tale of the world's existing purpose-built capitals.

Any century now

For planners of Great Capitals, timing is the first problem. Like so many grandiose state projects, capitals start late, finish later, and tend never to catch up with the rest of the world.

By historical standards, Putrajaya's delays are negligible. The project was launched in 1995, and will still in theory be finished early in the next century (note: in theory). It took the fledgling United States, by contrast, seven years just to agree on the site of the capital. Australia's states spent nine years bickering about Canberra's location—despite the constitution's stipulation that the capital be within 100 miles of Sydney in the state of New South Wales, which rather narrowed the choice. Brazilians first contemplated a new, inland capital in 1789; the name Brasilia was first suggested in 1822; yet construction did not start until 1956. Brazil went through no fewer than three constitutions, in 1891, 1934 and 1946, each enshrining the notion of a new capital, before ground was even broken on the site.

Even after construction gets under way, most purpose-built capital cities fall far behind schedule. Only Brasilia, once finally begun, was more or less completed on time. President Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira pushed the work through during his single term in office, from 1956 to 1960, because he knew that any successor would abandon the project unless presented with a fait accompli. But it took 17 years to build a suitable home for the Australian parliament in Canberra. Work started on Abuja, the new capital of Nigeria, in 1981, yet only the first of four phases has been completed so far.

Even those delays pale next to Washington's. The president and Congress waited for ten years in Philadelphia for the White House and the Capitol to be built, only to see both buildings destoyed by the British during the war of 1812 (forcing Congress to convene in a rickety inn called Blodgett's Hotel). As late as 1850, the land set aside for Delaware Avenue remained an undrained swamp. In 1842, Charles Dickens found the city still a vast building site: “Leave a brickfield without the bricks in all the central places where a street might be expected; and that's Washington.” The National Cathedral, which featured in the original 18th-century plan for the city, was not finished until 1991.

Some artificial capitals are simply abandoned. Haile Selassie began building a charming lakeside city for himself which was abandoned after the Ethiopian revolution. The idea of Raul Alfonsin, Argentina's previous president, to shift the country's capital to Patagonia was quickly dropped by Carlos Menem, his successor.

Money, too, is always a problem: not surprisingly, inasmuch as governments, unlike private developers, cannot plan to profit from their buildings (at least not directly). The outbreak of the first world war siphoned off much of the money earmarked for Canberra, forcing the committee overseeing construction to compensate by halving the projected size of the city. Walter Burley Griffin, the American designer, promptly resigned in protest. He, in turn, was following the example of Pierre Charles L'Enfant, the French architect of Washington, whom George Washington himself dismissed in 1792 for refusing to water down his extravagant blueprint.

Site unseen

Modern planners have been no more successful at controlling costs: the expense of building Belmopan, the modest new capital of the small Central American state of Belize, spiralled to more than four times the original estimate between 1962 and 1973. President Shehu Shagari of Nigeria was deposed in a military coup in 1983 thanks partly to the financial crisis brought on by the spending on Abuja.

Much expense and delay springs from the use of ill-informed designs. Burley Griffin posted his winning design for Canberra from Chicago, using the Australian government's handy application kit (consisting of a set of panoramic oil paintings of the site, a fact sheet on its climate and geology, 12 pages of instructions and two contour maps on which to sketch a proposal). The second prize went to Eliel Saarinen, a Finnish romantic architect, who was presumably equally ignorant of conditions in Australia. When Burley Griffin eventually travelled to Canberra to supervise construction, he had to spend the next few years adjusting his plans to fit his first-hand observations of the site.

At least Burley Griffin did adapt. Belmopan's American designers, who were moving the capital in part to escape Belize's coastal hurricanes, drew up housing plans that omitted to consider the ferocity of Belize's tropical rainstorms, forcing the first inhabitants to spend the rainy season bailing out their homes. Without providing for public transport, the planners also placed the industrial zone half an hour's walk from the workers' cheap housing, in order to include an ornamental park in a hamlet already surrounded by jungle.

Locals can be just as unthinking: George Washington himself helped choose Washington's waterlogged site, leaving the city unpleasantly humid to this day. (As if in retaliation, Abigail Adams, on first occupying the White House, decided to use the building's grandest reception room to dry the president's underwear.) Most of the Brazilian architects who competed to design Brasilia ignored the site's topography completely.

The best example of native pig-headedness, however, must be Peter the Great of Russia, who founded St Petersburg in the most barren, swampy, freezing, remote and indefensible corner of his huge empire. The name of the city's main river, Neva, is derived from the Finnish word for mud. Since Russians were understandably reluctant to settle in such a bleak spot, Peter had to bring them there by force: merchants were forbidden to trade from other cities, and noblemen were required to build houses in the new capital. To ensure an adequate supply of building materials in a region of stoneless wetlands, Peter forbade construction in stone anywhere else in Russia.

In the end, Peter got his comeuppance from nature: a flash flood nearly drowned him in 1721 on Nevsky Prospekt, St Petersburg's main street. Canberra faced some equally unpredictable embarrassments: the train bringing Australia's dignitaries there from Melbourne for the city's ground-breaking ceremony caught fire, putting construction behind schedule before it could officially begin.

The next problem for these star-crossed places is who, if anyone, will want to live there. It took six years for St Petersburg to accumulate 150 houses. Five years after Peter had moved his court there, the city was still such an outpost in the wilderness that a wolf supposedly ate a woman in broad daylight in the city centre. Washington's population was barely above 8,000 in 1815, 15 years after the federal government had arrived. As late as the 1840s, pigs still roamed along the Mall, its chief ceremonial axis.

Dull but pointless

Belmopan had no bakery for four years after its inauguration; when one opened, it was the city's fifth-largest private company. On seeing the young Canberra, a reporter from Punch remarked, “Londoners may be all too aware of the disadvantages of living in a city without a plan, but these cannot be compared with the rival disadvantages of living in a plan without a city.” By 1924, the city had planted 500 trees for each of its 3,000 residents.

Predictably, almost all the first citizens of artificial capitals are civil servants. Three-quarters of the original inhabitants of Belmopan were employed by the government, as were most of the original inhabitants of Abuja, Brasilia, Canberra and Washington. Urban monotony, in turn, puts off other prospective settlers. Belizeans did not want to move to Belmopan because it had no place to dance. Simone de Beauvoir asked of Brasilia, “What possible interest could there be in wandering about?” A visiting New Zealand city councillor said of Canberra in the 1970s, “The atmosphere is one of job security sans paupers, sans criminals, sans unemployed, sans vitality and sans colour.” Washington, too, retains to this day its reputation as a drab, bureaucratic city, culturally not a patch on New York, Los Angeles or Chicago.

To be fair, the designers usually intended as much. Brasilia was supposed to be everything that Rio de Janeiro, the previous capital, was not: small, sober and efficient. When the debate about a new capital was still in its infancy, in 1810, Veloso de Oliveira, an adviser to the Portuguese king, insisted that “the capital should be in a healthy, agreeable location free from the clamorous multitudes of people indiscriminately thrown together.” Washington, Canberra, Brasilia and Belmopan were all conceived as quiet, orderly places where civil servants could get on with their jobs without distraction. As one Australian bureaucrat put it, “I love Canberra, because it's a place designed for middle-aged civil servants with children.”

It is precisely this bureaucratic aloofness which prevents artificial capitals from seizing the public imagination and altering the course of a country's history, as their designers invariably intend. The inland locations of Canberra and Abuja did not succeed in luring their countries' populations to the vast uninhabited interiors. Nor did the transfer of Belize's capital from the coast to the more central Belmopan deter Guatemala from claiming the territory. Nor did Washington's location reconcile the secessionist states of the South to the federal project, nor does Ottawa's tactful symbolic bridging of the border between Quebec and Ontario cut much ice with today's Québécois.

Indeed, capitals designed to project a particular image, as Dr Mahathir intends with the futuristic Putrajaya, soon come to seem anachronistic, eccentric or both. Brasilia, for example, was intended in its day to be a city of the future, at a time when cars, aeroplanes and moulded concrete were the ultimate symbols of progress. The city itself is laid out in the shape of an aeroplane, with the federal government and the cathedral in the cockpit, commerce in the cabin, industry in the tail and housing on the wings. The centre of the design is an enormous motorway junction connecting the monotonous cinderblocks of the “Esplanade of the Ministries” with the monotonous cinderblocks of the residential zone. What was intended at the time to showcase a spirit of rationalism and modernity now showcases 1950s kitsch.

Capitals, being grand national projects, invite planners and politicians to compose mighty hymns, paint patriotic scenes and indulge abstract conceits, rather than to build places to live and work. Canberra's designer, Burley Griffin, wrote that he wanted “to treat architecture as a democratic language of everyday life.” To that end, he laid Canberra out in the shape of a huge theatre of democracy, with the population in the racked seating sloping down the hillsides to an artificial lake, the government on the raised stage beyond, and the beauty of the mountains behind as an inspirational backdrop. Very clever, but would you want to live there?

No place like home

Quite possibly not. The end result of planning along these lines is usually a city that is neither inspirational nor functional. Brasilia's designers, for example, dreamt of a prosperous, mobile society. So they made no provision for the poor. Predictably enough, huge, unplanned shanty towns have sprung up beyond the sleek, rational city centre. Likewise, many of Washington's problems spring from its conception as a showpiece rather than a working city. And the capital's hybrid status—not quite a state, nor a municipality, nor a federal territory—hampers efforts to fix things.

In the end, purpose-built capitals do serve as monuments, but the message they convey is rarely the one intended. The bloody-mindedness with which Peter the Great worked to death thousands of Russian serfs and Swedish prisoners-of-war in the making of his city exemplifies centuries of Russian and, later, Soviet despotism. The construction of Abuja drove the indigenous Gwari people off their ancestral lands, in the same way that development elsewhere in Nigeria has come at the expense of local populations. The crumbling roads and bumbling schools of Washington have become symbols of the federal government's inability to solve problems even in its own backyard.

The Kazakh and Malaysian governments may finish their capital cities. But they had better beware: they are painting self-portraits in asphalt and concrete.